For much of the past decade, the game of tennis has seemed on a steady slog towards a joyless aerobics-driven end in which He Who Can Keep the Ball in Play Longest will win the major events, often in five hours or more.

Men and women, nearly everyone stands on the baseline and slugs it out, and victory goes to he/she who avoids hitting it into the net (or wide), comes up with a few winners and he/she who reaches physical exhaustion later.

Which is why the women’s final in the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships last night was so much fun — for all the things it was not.

It was not dull. It was not the high-skill version of baseline tennis. It was not about automatons mindless banging away forehands and two-handed backhards for hours on end. This had thinking and tactics and was entertaining across the spectrum of athletic endeavor.

Petra Kvitova versus Sara Errani.

First, a bit of background.

Kvitova is a big (6-foot-and-maybe-more) but only slightly ungainly left-hander from the Czech Republic who is good enough to have won Wimbledon already, and got to the final here by beating some pretty good players — Angelique Kerber and Caroline Wozniacki among them. She has a huge serve, and can cover the court in about two strides.

Sara Errani is the anti-Kvitova. She is a stumpy little person, about 5-foot-5, who plays a bit like Martina Hingis. Errani is a bit more muscled than was Hingis, but Hingis is 5-foot-7; she just seemed shorter in the era of Venus and Lindsay.

Errani, an Italian who made the French Open final last year, clearly is a very good athlete, and she will grind down lesser players by running them ragged. But she doesn’t have the advantage of levers and length the 6-footers have.

When the final began, I thought it might be over in 40 minutes. Kvitova led 4-0 in 15 minutes. She just kept pounding winners into the corners. My recollection is that Errani spent those first four games just running around not reaching winners, and that she won about five points.

Errani won a couple of games to end the first set 6-2, but this match looked done and dusted, as the Brits would say.

What Errani had noticed, and when you are 5-5 and playing elite tennis you do this sort of thing, was that she had won a few points by coming to the net — which once was a common strategy but has been nearly abandoned in the modern era because good players will pass an opponent who dares to come to the net.

But Errani had just been nuked in the first set, and she was clutching at any straw the could reach, and serve-and-volley was it.

She followed up any remotely short shot by coming to the net, and she handled herself with near perfection there, banging winners just over the net which the less-nimble Kvitova could not possibly reach, requires as it did the quick starts she doesn’t have, and the match was turned upside down. Errani dominated the set, winning it 6-1.

At that point, I was just as confident Errani would win as I had been a half-hour earlier, when I was sure Kvitova would win.

But it was Kvitova’s turn to make a tactical change.

Keenly aware that the little Italian was killing her at the net, Kvitova knew she could not be short from the baseline.  If she were going to miss, it would be long, not short. She would keep Errani pinned deep, and any moves the Italian made to the net would be forced, lacking the proximity Kvitova had allowed her in the second set disaster.

And the match flipped again. Kvitova was able to keep the ball deep, Errani was back playing an unequal match of baseline tennis and the Czech won the set (and the match) at 6-1.

The National’s reporter at the match, Ahmed Rizvi, was suitably impressed by the final, and made that clear in his match report.

It was fun to watch. And I’m not sure when was the last time I was entertained by a tennis match — rather than just left in awe of the bloody-mindedness of the likes of Djokovic, Nadal, Murray, et al, who win tennis-as-trench-warfare matches that leave feet bloody and fans numb.

Maybe this game might yet be fun. Maybe it could catch on.